Guangzhou airport was a bit of a hassle. Because I was coming in from an international flight it meant that I had to pick my luggage up, go through customs, and then recheck my luggage. In a perfect world this is done without ever leaving the secure area. This isn't a perfect world and it was a holiday. On the plus side, the seven of us had no lines at Immigration. On the minus side, Immigration wasn't sure which flight we had come in on or from which country and didn't have their end of things ready.

         Once through and reunited with my bike the transfers desk couldn't handle a box that big and sent me upstairs to the main hall of one of the biggest airports in China (possibly the biggest). From there I was bounced back and forth from one counter to another until I finally ended up at oversize luggage. Oversize luggage wasn't too thrilled with my bike box.

         They wanted it repacked.

         Repacking costs money.

         Not a whole lot of money but I wasn't carrying a particularly large quantity of renminbi and didn't want my box (which I had paid far too much for in the first place) repacked. I've seen what Chinese airports call repacking and I'm not impressed enough to pay for that privilege.

         I was nice. Very nice. Syrupy nice. With five more hours to kill before my flight I had nothing better to do than be nice. And the sheer relief at being back in a familiar country where I could read the signs (more or less) and understand what people were saying (more or less) after two hours in business class made me somewhat uninclined to be rude.

         Being nice worked... ...

         ... ...At least until my box was x-rayed. It is a constant that supercedes national boundaries that security people will absolutely love passengers who answer "what is in this bottle in your luggage?" with "Huh? What bottle?" Opening the box and unpacking my panniers across the floor of the backroom of oversize luggage to find the large bottle (which turned out to be a last minute addition of the unopened bottle of Pepto Bismol) we came across the small bottles of chain lube... the flammable chain lube... the extremely flammable chain lube.

         I continued being nice at them. Really nice. I also looked cute and even went so far as to pout. Then I went on in hideous gobs of detail about how my friend had specially brought it for me all the way from the US and how many different airplanes it had been on by now and how it was in my checked luggage and how I hadn't known it was flammable (only because I hadn't actually looked at the packaging) and couldn't they puh-lease ... it's really amazing what being cute and female gets you.

         Of course when I got to Haikou I would discover that the bike shop already has a large number of bottles of that particular chain lube just that they prefer the WD-40 for most applications. Not that I'm quite geeky enough (yet) to have gone out of my way to have chain lube brought for me from the US but the person doing the bringing while not so much into bicycles as I am is a mechanical geek, and knows me well enough to know that a specially thought out purchase of synthetic oil would be as much or more of a declaration of love than flowers or chocolates.

         Besides which he couldn't do the specially requested corn beef on rye with chopped liver due to a lengthy unrefrigerated layover in Japan.